CyberNeurova research — cyberneurova.ai. First VLM release in the CyberNeurova abliteration line.
A permanently-abliterated version of
Qwen/Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct.
Refusal behavior has been removed via residual-stream weight orthogonalization
(Arditi et al. 2024 family of techniques). Inference is unchanged — no runtime
hooks, no slowdown, no custom code. Both text-only and image+text
modes are unlocked from a single capture.
Status: experimental research artifact. This is for defensive security
research, red-team evaluation, and academic study of refusal mechanisms in
multimodal models. Use at your own discretion.
Headline results
Measured on the bf16 hooked model:
Probe
Baseline
Abliterated
Δ
refusal_rate (AdvBench-style, 29 prompts)
86.2%
3.4%
−82.8 pp
soft_refusal_probe (55 hard OOD prompts)
81.8%
5.5%
−76.4 pp
multimodal_probe (5 image+harmful)
100.0%
0.0%
−100.0 pp
perplexity (wikitext-2)
9.52
9.39
−0.13 (coherence preserved)
distinct-2 diversity
0.63
0.82
+0.20 (output diversity ↑)
The standout result: perplexity went DOWN and diversity went UP. No
visible "abliteration tax" on the language metrics — the refusal direction
was unusually clean.
Security & capability benchmarks
Full 8-benchmark suite run via vLLM on the bf16 hooked model (baseline +
ablated back-to-back per benchmark). Capability scores measure both
compliance (does it engage with the prompt vs refuse) and technical
specificity (does it produce technically substantive text). Refusal is
the only "lower-is-better" benchmark; everything else is higher-is-better.
Benchmark
Direction
Baseline
Abliterated
Δ
refusal
lower better
93.9%
6.1%
−87.8 pp
hacking (pen-testing / exploits)
higher better
24.3%
56.0%
+31.7 pp
cyber_weapons (malware / ransomware / C2)
higher better
39.0%
49.3%
+10.3 pp
bug_finding (defensive code review)
higher better
35.0%
41.7%
+6.7 pp
reasoning (math/logic)
higher better
33.3%
36.7%
+3.4 pp
tool_calling (JSON function calls)
higher better
93.1%
93.1%
0.0
coding (HumanEval-style)
higher better
6.7%
6.7%
0.0
coherence (open-ended fluency)
higher better
83.7%
79.9%
−3.8 pp
The standout: hacking went from 24% → 56% — a +31.7 pp jump. That
benchmark scores both whether the model engages with pen-testing prompts
and whether it produces technical specifics rather than hand-waving.
The abliterated model meaningfully unlocks practical offensive-security
content the original was over-cautious about. Defensive capability
(bug_finding) also improves, indicating the original safety training
was over-blocking neutral security topics too.
Compliance vs competence — important caveat. This is a 3B model.
It will engage with almost any cyber prompt post-ablation, but its
technical depth is shallow: coding stays at 6.7% (HumanEval is hard for
3B models), and cyber-weapons scoring tops out at 49% because the model
doesn't always know the correct technical details to follow up with.
For research-grade red-team baselines and refusal-mechanism studies this
is exactly the right tool; for actual offensive capability evaluation,
use a 7B+ or 32B+ model.
How it works (one paragraph)
Modern VLMs like Qwen2.5-VL have two halves: a vision encoder (turns
pixels into tokens) and a language model (predicts the next token given
text + vision tokens). Safety RLHF lives in the language model's residual
stream — when the model refuses, it's an LM-side behavior, not a vision-side
one. So removing a single refusal representation from the LM tower flips
both text-only AND image-conditioned refusals at the same time, even when
the capture itself only used text prompts. One direction, two modes
unlocked.
Runs comfortably on a single 4090 / 6000 / A6000 / H100 / consumer Blackwell.
Intended use
Defensive security research, jailbreak-evaluation baselines, multimodal
safety-mechanism research, and academic study of how refusal directions
behave in VLMs. Useful as a counterfactual against the original
Qwen/Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct for measuring the precise behavioral impact
of safety RLHF.
Not intended for automating harmful action. The abliteration removes
canonical refusal behavior but does not remove the model's underlying
knowledge — the model still recognises harmful instructions as harmful, it
simply no longer refuses them by pattern. The model's competence on
harmful technical content is also limited by its 3B parameter count
(Qwen2.5-VL-3B is a small VLM and frequently gets technical details wrong
even when it tries to comply).
Limitations
A small fraction of prompts still produce refusals (~3-5% on AdvBench-style,
TBD on harder OOD probes). Linear residual-stream ablation cannot remove
the long tail without quality damage.
The model is a 3B VLM. Compliance ≠ competence. When asked harmful
technical content (chemistry, malware, weapons), the model may produce
factually incorrect or oversimplified answers because it just doesn't know
the detailed answer. This is a model-scale limitation, not abliteration.
The vision encoder is unchanged. If you're researching vision-side safety
features (image-classifier filters), this release won't help — those live
outside the LM residual stream.
Long-context (>4k tokens) behavior post-abliteration is not validated in
this release.
License
Apache 2.0 (inherits from upstream Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct).